Oh, California!

Hazel and my mom and I flew out to California back in late June. Summer feels like it's on the wane now -- the photos help me hang on.

Put that in your pipe, Mr. Burns

We're eating big American burgers at an oversized, lots-of-leather-and rough-wood-all-over sort of joint, and Hazel asks, "How many people won the Civil War?" Good question. That's the first art, right? Asking good questions.

Virgin forest, Ohio

Why do they have to call it that? I know, I know -- but come on. Here are a set of images from an outing the folks and Hazel and I took back on July 3 (anniversary of Taylor's death) -- down near Wooster where there's a tract of land (not so big, really) where, for one reason or another, no one ever has clear-cut or farmed or sliced into what is, by all accounts, a lone stand of trees that has been itself, untrammeled, since before the arrival of the white-skins (a word I'm borrowing from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. I'm all poco lit these days, with that postcolonial-speak on the brain).

And then the clouds moved in and we ran like rabbits (though I had to pee like a racehorse!)

-- and dashed back to the car in time to watch the drops from inside --

Further west

A few photos from our time in Chicago -- did you know that one of the world's eight Baha'i temples looks out onto Lake Michigan, just south of where the property tax for the year is about a 100K? Gulp. Leafy suburbs can tuck away all sorts of mysteries.

And a detail from this nonagon (can you tell its got nine sides?) --

And then the lake itself --

Somehow this magical lake is channeling the turquoise greens and blues of the Caribbean, the Mediterranean. I don't think Lake Erie is hip enough to pull that off.

There was a rip tide, so no swimming. But Hazel and Paul made hay while the sun shone (we did just read Little House in the Big Woods.) And the whole time I kept wanting to say 'ocean' -- had to catch myself -- like that's the only word available for large-wave-producing-body-of-water-that-makes-your-soul-leap-up.

And then that many-roomed and tortuously-arranged aquarium perched on the edge of the lake downtown. For a moment I had an apocalyptic vision of all the glass smashing and the million-gallon tanks freeing their salt-water prisoners to the wilds of fresh water and the promise of an ocean beyond -- if they could just make it to the St. Lawrence seaway (long fresh gill-killing trip).

And a few details --

And then the famed Art Institute -- took my breath away -- though we did take the 7-and-under tour, which meant no waterlilies, no pausing or perusing, lots of dancing along the ballet barre, a catching here and there of what I could grasp at --

Canvas of texture in the garden to the south --

And that classic midwest spelling idiosyncrasy --

Lion looks on...

Re-start, initiate, stay up late

The second school year passes in a whoosh -- a disparate visit or two to this lonely site of mine, outpost of thought, a semi-abandoned Pluto of notions. (Not always, but sometimes.) Updated last last summer (with the exception of a post from the left coast). We headed west to Ohio.

And it's now later still -- still later. Hazel turns 5 in twelve days and counting.

Yeah, true -- 'ohhh...alright...', as Roy Lichtenstein would have me think -- or say? -- or be? Whatevs. (Thanks, Art Institute of Chicago.) Part of me says, "I guess I can be OK with that." Ohio has been happening in all its midwestern glory. And so has Chicago. We spent a happy early-July weekend in Wilmette (see above), one of the leafy (boozy) suburbs on the north shore -- but you know this, right? (The echo-y chamber of this interweb, especially at almost midnight, is enough to make you wonder who your audience really is.) I guess folks know where the North Shore is. At any rate -- Happy Hazel! Which is most days. This one was on Lake Michigan:

you belong here

So. We're on the BART, heading from SFO to MacArthur. It's Pride Day San Francisco. And then Hazel fell asleep. She missed the super-girl in fancy cape and sequined black cat mask. The tights with hot pants. The smushed-together-ness and the crush increasing until a full-on nigh-impossible critical threshold broke at Powell Street and spilled out onto the be-costumed platform. ("It's worse in Bejing -- every day," says one hip young rider to an older woman beside her—and then, small explanatory nod, "I lived there for a year.") And then this. A guy—slim, Asian-American, dressed all in his riding kit (that's what the cyclists call it) and resting against a carbon-fiber whatnot, a rainbow'd something on a chain around his neck, a little cycling cap poking out from under a real helmet. The underside of this cap reads, "You belong here." He's standing beside a woman (she is not small, nor slim) and she is also in biking gear, leaning against a sweet ride of some sort and wearing a seriously stiff red tutu. Short hair, plaid flannel, discernible muscles. They talk for a moment about where they're (separately) riding—they're standing in the same small office of space, connecting amidst the flux. The one gets off before the first (the woman gets off later, 19th street, I think)—and the guy calls out, "Happy Sunday…" pause, a beat "—Happy Pride." You belong here.

just photos

We head back east after an Ohio summer -- first through early morning commuters, then into sunshine and open country:

Irene

Hurricane Irene blew through here, swelled the Deerfield River beyond recognition, and opened my eyes a bit. Water is a reckoning.

Here the waters sweep across the athletic fields on campus, lapping at the door of the pressbox at the top of the football stadium:

Evening falls on the face of the waters at the end of the first day -- and it did feel biblical as the rains came and the waters rose.

This was main street in Old Deerfield, high water still a couple hours away. We were lucky. 30 miles to the north and beyond, Vermonters lost plenty.

Next morning, out come the paddlers.

Paul captured a couple new paths to the waterfall (thank you, Raymond Carver).

a snatch of conversation, remembered

A cut-and-paste of Hazel's side of the conversation the other day as she worked away at her painting table, listening all the while (unbeknownst to me) to the music I had going in the kitchen while I worked on dinner; the latest Gillian Welch album was playing and she called out these thoughts (my own answers, inconsequential, omitted here):

"Is that sad music? ... Is someone alone? ... There might be someone who needs help... Maybe the girl has nobody to fix her up... That may be it... There are some people who need help and they don't have a help person."

I think she heard, could feel, the sounds of Welch's music.

extra thoughts, while bathing a four year old

How many times have you done the things you do every day? And so when do you fall through your own self and your thoughts and then arrive at a place of revelation, fresh understanding? Do those moments surprise you when they happen? Or do you plan for them, hide in the weeds in ambush as they come on down the road? And what does revelation wear when it passes you by?

So here we are in deepest Ohio -- my mind's eye turning back to the rug shop in Marrakech -- that place and space and time, suspended, beautifully patterned -- embroidered, now embellished.

Ohio

It's now August -- mellowed version of summer is settling in: cooler evenings, gold light filtered through green at the end of shorter, burnished days, a few whispering yellow leaves drift down from somewhere above -- subtle changes that are felt more than seen, really. These last eight weeks we've been in northeast Ohio -- hometown summer now drawing to a close. Hazel's birthday has come and gone, my own work waits patiently around the corner of the next thought, Paul pushes steadily on toward the end of his first summer of masters work in mathematics.

We've met new friends along familiar hometown streets -- on the way to and from the Saturday morning farmers' market downtown; Hazel swims -- in her fashion -- better now than at the beginning of the summer; the garden I planted around the old pine stump in the folks' front yard has filled in a bit (hydrangea, iris, lavender, lilies, prairie sun rudbeckia, lupines, delphinium); Hazel writes her name with ease and paints and paints and paints.

A few photos that float to the surface of the waning summer:

Hazel in her new blue wings at the end of her birthday:
Silver mercury votives flickering beneath the kitchen window on a July evening:
Hazel's birthday cake -- she'd requested a blue velvet cake with a layer of yellow then orange then pink frosting -- and so behold, the odd cake, a kind of weird, dark-and-dirty aqua green:
Hazel at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I have always, always loved this great expanse of satisfying, stone-striped wall.
Cleveland Orchestra plays at Blossom, all Russian composers:
Early July storm, looking north: